Lil Nas X and Why Events Will Never Be the Same
I had a great dialogue with my friend and colleague Tony Lorenz this week on LinkedIn about dropping the notion of naming events as physical, virtual, hybrid, etc., and just calling them events. Tony took a great stance and I am aligned a thousand percent. It’s time for anyone holding onto the past with these silly distinctions to accept that events will never be the same again. There is no going back. Yes, we’ll have physical events, but done well, they will forever be anchored as experiences around which other aspects of one’s portfolio comes into play.
The writing was on the wall. We said nearly a decade ago that events needed to be thought of as 24/7/365, and frankly, the tools have now caught up. The pandemic just catapulted this inevitable change in a major way. Physical events as we knew them were getting long in the tooth. As I’ve written before, a generation weaned and raised on social and doing most things from the screen of a mobile device weren’t gonna be thinking first about getting on planes to walk large exhibit halls.
It was also a matter of time before Extinction Rebellion showed up waving flags against climate change and the enormous footprints of trade shows. Now we have a pandemic forcing the change, and the longer it goes on, the longer people’s habits will be conditioned to think about physical events differently. Frankly, their threshold for when to go will be higher as new habits form for video working (well).
Our data shows that older men are the ones who will go back to big tradeshows first and that the younger generation is less likely. If we need to understand this more, there is nothing else like Lil Nas X and his in-game/concert to blow your mind and paint a very exacting picture as to why our next generation of workers will think of exhibit halls as akin to the dinosaur. When my colleague David Worlock sent this article to me I laughed: 35 million kids attending a concert in-game. As he said, it not only answers the question of what these kids are doing during the lockdown, it begs the question of what changes will they bring when they enter the workforce. I can tell you that they’re going to expect experiences like the one in this video.
While I hear execs yearn for the good old days when we can “go back” with events coming back in full force, I say to them: Watch the next generation. What goes on in consumer happens in business, and it’s happened for years in this industry. It’s going to happen to events in spades. It is happening. This is our chance to get it right. Focus on a portfolio of experiences and integrate them with your brand. And when all else fails, let Lil Nas X be your guide. He’s pointing the way.